Seth Shostak Quotes

Like all writers, I draw from life as I know it; but it's a refracted kind of reality, and none of it is factually true.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

I love stories - devising them, writing them, reading them, watching them, being a part of them.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

My secrets must be poetic to be believable.

I like to write about things that don't reflect exactly on my life.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

The reward is that you can actually create a world separate from reality with a story, actors, music, and camera design. When it works it can entertain, move people and teach us all.

I was always at heart a novelist and wanted to tell a bigger story, so I wanted to create people who told other kinds of truths than literal truths.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

I like writing because you can make things happen and turn out the way they never do in real life.

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

To me, the most important thing is to tell a good story. If I can do that, I think that enlightenment, respect of nature, etc. follows.

The novel is not so much a literary genre, but a literary space, like a sea that is filled by many rivers.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

I certainly knew from an early age... how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people's heads.

Some stories are true that never happened.